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Your support helps us reach so many learners, including university students, PreK–12 students, and members of our community. Our Center for Education is an essential element in fulfilling our mission to be a preeminent teaching museum. We offer experiences that inspire arts-based learning for diverse audiences.
Description of the video:
Lauren Daugherty: Art therapy at it’s core is a mental health profession that promotes health and well-being in individuals of all ages with a variety of concerns. But it really is a lot more than that here at the Eskenazi Museum of Art — it’s a way for people to understand better the world around them and their relationships with others by immersing themselves in the creative process.So here our programming we’re doing things in the galleries we’re looking at and talking about art. And we’re also making art in our brand new art-making studio.
Heidi Davis-Soylu: It’s actually quite unusual to have an art therapist on staff at a university art museum. There are a handful of art therapy programs at big city art museums. But the Eskenazi Museum of Art is really at the leading edge of the art therapy presence in university context.Our art therapy program is going to make the museum more accessible to individuals with disabilities for example, or those with mental health concerns, or simply those wanting to grow and learn more about themselves and the world they live in. As a teaching museum, we feel it is important to invite every audience possible to engage with our collection and to experience our art therapy program.
Lauren Daugherty: The way art therapists utilize art materials is a little bit different from traditional art educators. For example, individuals with anxiety, they often are most successful with materials that are more controllable. So things like collage, markers, and colored pencils. And folks that can handle art materials that offer a little bit more of an emotive response — they will use things such as pastels and watercolor. There are art materials that fit individuals of all levels of functioning and art therapists are specifically trained mental health professionals that know when to use those materials to support their clients and make them as successful as possible.
Sharon Wiseman: I was fortunate to take part in an Art Heals class that Lauren Daugherty gave for Lifelong Learning at IU and I learned some very interesting things. First, what fun it was to be exposed to a lot of different art materials —everything from clay to watercolor to pastels. And as an adult we just don’t have that much opportunity to play and to work with art materials. Second, it was very interesting for me to learn how art and art materials could be used in therapy to help people lead better lives. And it gives me great hope that many people will have an opportunity to take advantage of this. And third, it was very satisfying to be able to use color, line, art materials in a way to express emotions or something that was happening in my own life. And then to see it, there physically, or on paper.And I really hope that more people have an opportunity to experience art therapy.
Lauren Daugherty: Art therapy at the Eskenazi Museum of Art utilizes a unique approach — one that isn’t really present in the majority of art therapy programs. It places just as much emphasis on the meanings that art therapy clients find in works in our collection and the meaning they find in works they create themselves. By offering this type of art therapy in a university art museum, we’re connecting students, staff, faculty, and members of the Bloomington community with wonderful works of art. We’re exposing those same individuals to the healing power of the creative process and are promoting health and well-being campus and community wide. The art therapy program allows the museum to further activate it’s wonderful collection and our art-making studio by encouraging deep, personal meaning-making and reflection, which then allows art therapy clients to really, you know, make a lasting connection with the museum, with specific works of art, and with art making processes that lead to healing.
